One intriguing recent development is criticism of the way architecture is regulated, with much speculation about what changes might be introduced by government and what their effect might be. This all relates to post-Grenfell fire anxieties, and the desire on the part of government to be seen to be doing something. It has announced the intention to create an all-industry regulator, rather than the patchwork system which currently operates, whereby architects are heavily penalised.

Penalised in two ways: first, anyone wishing to call themselves an architect must pay about £250 a year to be listed by the Architects Registration Board, and complete its continuing professional development programme annually; secondly, by the fact that there is n o representation of the profession on the ARB. At one time the regulatory body, which has existed since 1931, had 50 per cent of its board made of up architects elected to the post. Now there are none. Taxation without representation.

ARB does not represent architects or architecture in any sense other than regulating them. That task falls to the RIBA, which costs about £450 a year, and also requires completion of cpd courses.

A legal case from yesteryear established that anybody using the affix ‘RIBA’ after their name, at least in the UK, thereby held themselves out to be an architect. If they had not paid their ARB tithe, they were not entitled to do so and were thus guilty of a criminal offence.

That short history has been brought back into focus by a bombshell announcement by the president of the RIBA, Chris Williamson, that he would no longer pay the ARB fee. A successful architect who recently sold his practice and is financially independent, Williamson is a man of principle. He is not cutting any link with the ARB to save money. Rather, he is drawing attention to the absurdity of a situation in which protection of title is unaccompanied by any protection of function – a situation created in 1931 when a proportion of the profession opposed regulation and any such protection, including Lutyens.

Almost immediately, Jack Pringle, chairman of the RIBA Trustee Board, followed suit and announced that he too would no long pay an ARB fee. Will this action, by the two people who in effect control the RIBA politically, result in mass non-payments by architects at large?

Unlikely in the short term, especially for architects who undertake competition work, especially abroad, where registration is often required for pre-qualification. Also, who wants to risk using the RIBA affix alone if they think they might be prosecuted?

In the case of Williamson and Pringle, the former can use the affix PRIBA without falling foul of registration law, and similarly the latter who, as a former president, can use the affix PPRIBA (ie past-president). These are posts, and appear to be exempt from the protection of title regulations. Good luck to the ARB if it attempted to bring prosecutions against these tough veterans.

But what about an ordinary RIBA member who dropped out of ARB but continued to use the affix? Would human rights legislation come into play were such a person to be prosecuted, even though they have passed the RIBA’s three-part examination programme and undertake cpd courses as required by their professional institute?

And what would happen if 5,000 RIBA members decided to stop paying their ARB fee? Mass prosecutions? It seems unlikely, but watch this space.

Palace of Westminster – a Whitehall farce

Lurid headlines suggesting that restoration costs of the Mother of Parliaments could reach £40 billion have suddenly focussed public attention on the way in which our political shambles is mirrored by the shambles surrounding the necessary retrofit of the Palace of Westminster.

The most expensive option, which was analysed in depth years ago by the mini-development corporation created to manage this project but foolishly abandoned, is for members of the House of Commons to remain in situ, while members of the upper house (the House of Lords) vacate the palace for what will seem an eternity.

Logic suggests that both upper and lower houses should move out to speed up a project already predicted to take decades to complete, but the Speaker of the House of Commons, who has great influence in this matter, is apparently an enemy of the Lords and happy for the public to pay an enormous price for their humiliation.

This project has been fraught with political difficulties from the outset, quite apart from the huge scale of construction required to bring an unsafe, asbestos-riddled relic into something like 21st century standards. Uncertainty over the future of the House of Lords, the impact of devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales, and the implication of technology which allows meetings and voting to take place remotely, have scarcely been addressed. There is an embarrassing sense that ‘business as usual’ is in any way an appropriate mantra in respect of a project which might have daunted the Victorians.

The 19th century project which created the Palace of Westminster was led by Charles Barry, who had both the architectural skill and force of personality to deal with scheming and inadequate politicians, and engineers on the make who thought they knew better than Barry. For anyone interested, the story of this heroic civil engineering and architectural project is well told in Mr Barry’s War by Caroline Shenton (Oxford University Press). If only we had a Charles Barry today.

Archigram then and now

Welcome news for Brutalist fans is the listing of the South Bank Centre buildings as being of architectural and historical significance. This follows a campaign by the UK 20th Century Society, led by its director Catherine Croft (a WAF judge), to acknowledge formally the importance of the concrete 1960s cultural complex.

The listing was announced in the same week as an event at the AA in London, celebrating publication of Archigram The Magazine (DAP), a box set of all the original Archigram publications in their original formats and sizes.

Present were Peter Cook and David Greene (Michael Webb may have been looking in online), the gang survivors, with Peter giving a concluding commentary on what it was all about, and why nostalgia is absolutely to be eschewed. (Worth noting that when nostalgia was coined as a word and condition, it was treated as a problematic medical condition, like neuralgia.)

Not present, because no longer with us, were the three Archigram members who worked on the South Bank Centre, and in particular the Hayward Gallery: Warren Chalk Dennis Crompton and Ron Herron. Their legacy thus includes a facet of London’s built history as well as a contribution to the Archigram archive, now located at the M+ art museum in Hong Kong. This required formal purchase permission from the UK government, because it constitutes a part of our national cultural heritage.

Various brief contributions at the AA event, including one from your correspondent, preceded a brilliant audio-visual ‘operetta’, created by Dennis Crompton’s son Dan, which related the ideas in the Archigram publications to contemporary music and film clips. Without Dennis, none of the archive would have survived in useable form, and the evening was at least in part a tribute to his rigour and discipline in keeping it useable.

This was so lively and provocative that nobody in the packed lecture room could mistake it for nostalgia. There are plenty of people around who want to keep today’s flag flying in the spirit of those 1960s mavericks.